The Carnival Trilogy (44 page)

I could not leave it there. I felt the necessity to restate Alicia’s misgivings and anxieties, the anguish of women enslaved by the codes of men, the contracts, the bonds, instigated at a psychical level by men. What was Being? What was Presence? Black, white, ancient, modern
Agamemnon
was but a partial and bleak manifestation of sacrificed Being (to which women were subject) within a civilization disposed to War (whether violent war or non-violent war) and a humanity disposed to the betrayal of itself, the betrayal of what it appeared to admire or love. As much as to say sacrificed Being in its ancient fullness lay within
immediacies
of private grief, private betrayal, even as it moved beyond all narrow confinement or pigmentation, narrow gender, male, female, towards an infinite goal. Presence was the immensely and varied genius of the sacred. Presence
(Alicia had made plain, Penelope too in the ceaselessly unfinished garment she wove) gave birth to characters of well-nigh impossible mythical stature in our midst whose roots lay (Alicia knew) beyond individual seizure, they lay in us, all levels of the politic and the private, all vocations, all despairs, all hopes …

Yes, I was grateful to Alicia beyond formal understanding. Rose was my jealous mother, Alicia my spiritual womb and I had inherited all her misgivings about the codes of a male, aggressive society which nevertheless she had to bear in celebration and art and ritual, to translate, to puncture, to transform by subtle degrees into her own state.

The moment had come to enter the room where the judge sat. I turned before doing so to scan black Agamemnon for the last time. He was about to fade, to vanish into
nothingness
. I saw him for the last time as a prime refugee of war (I recalled my scientific mission in the Potaro to advise, survey the river, map, report to Alicia’s government in the palace of the Rose, on the possibilities of a settlement for refugees). I saw him not only in the Potaro but in Palestine. He was running through a hail of bullets. Slain child, slain dancer, slain man, slain woman. They were all part of me, part of my team, part of Canaima’s team. They wore the slightly pulled down, evasive bandage or cap of dreams, cap of my private family on their brow.

Once again the Dream trembled on the verge of extinction and one was tempted to run from oneself, run from the past and the future. I saw the glimmering seed of a new dynasty in resurrected family from the body of a slain child, slain man, slain woman even now in some dusty corner of a Palestinian/Potaro-esque/El Dorado-esque garden or Bush or hillside within the estate of nature.

I saw the bloodstained curtain of Haiti, of the Middle East, of the South Americas. ‘There are alternatives,’ I cried. ‘Quantum parallels imply self-recognitions across
hard-and-fast
barriers as well as subtle alternatives within a ruling
frame or pattern of fate. The birth of the state is already possessed of a royalty of the Imagination that is prepared to surrender itself to us. Why must we kill and subsist on martyrdoms?’

I touched the knife in Agamemnon’s body as he vanished into hovering Presence beyond structured gender or
appearance
, through Rose, through every stained-glass window I visualized in post-Christendom cathedral, through every Protean riddle of Being. My trial had commenced. Not as I may have expected. The noble judge for whom I looked in the room I had entered had apparently not yet arrived. Or if he were here (as I thought he was) he was invisible to me. It would have been impossible to entertain such a paradox but I had – as epic ancient yet futuristic character on the first bank of the river of space – been cloaked by invisibility when I turned from Canaima’s victim and made my way to the Waterfall.

Was invisibility a form of grace one shares unaccountably with daemons and furies? I had shared it with the terrifying Canaima.

Was invisibility the hidden curvature of the art of God one clings to unknowingly? Such curvature raised issues of
the
imagination
of
the
unimaginable.
In less daunting terms it raised issues of marginality, of our capacity to stand upon the margins of our world, to know ourselves as absent from yet present in the world, to free ourselves from a rigid category of vested interests, and thus with profoundest disinterestedness to realize potentials we scarcely dream we may call upon in tapping beginnings that
reach
into
priorities
that are so faint we have forgotten how pertinent they are to us,
reach
equally into endings or endlessness: the marriage of faint conception to a faintness that seems
extinction
but is not extinction …

Christ’s Presence was there, I knew, but as the strangest spectator of the funerals and the cradles of civilization. I was unable to see him except in the degree that he assisted me to
perceive the serial bodies, or serial funerals, processions, serial cradles, conceptions, that moved on the third bank of the river of space.

My translations of an art I pursued through partial
pigmentation
, colour, tone, etc., an art that lay therefore beyond total seizure, were the beginnings of an essential humility but I knew one must persist even if one were accused of pride.

I framed the measure of persistence into temporary
scaffoldings
in which it seemed that each killed serial body was an abstract spectator at its own funeral, each unborn or gestating metaphor a window backwards into the spark of life. Here was the marriage of purely visualized architectures and sculptures to the genesis of the Word. In such a marriage the invisible Word of creation becomes concrete or the seminal proportion of Dream, the seminal proportion of the music and the rhythm of vision by abstract spirit, abstract substance.

‘Face the concrete,’ the Voice in the corridor said, a Voice that was attached to no absolute beginning, no absolute ending, within alternatives, parallel spaces, sculptures of myth and history. I could not resist the quantum humour of paradox. Without the invisible one would lose the seminal secret that resides in vision (the birth of vision as deathless life), would lose the medium or spark of divine comedy, abstract self-judgement, abstract fertility clothed by apparent nothingness.

It was a thought, an intuition, an inspiration that I could not yet fathom though the Voice of invisible Christ had spoken with such authority.

My mind was inhabited by questions of the architectures of birth and extinction, the locality and non-locality of ideas, questions of the origins of space (
somethingness-in-nothingness
) that I could not frame.

Yet an answer began to unfold on the third bank of the river of space through the memory of concrete Shadows that
had visited me, or I them, on the first and second banks of the tilted rivers of the epic Guyanas, epic cosmos. I had been fortunate to gain through them a spark or grain of the seminal concrete of which Christ had spoken.

Suddenly it were as if radio-voiced, radio-armed Proteus slid into quantum television along the curvature of the arc of God in partial response to my unspoken questions or prayers. He (Proteus) turned into a spectator at his own funeral. He was there before me, he was here beside me, in the throng that viewed him. He had split himself into a versatile primordium or television amoeba, television irony, through which to contemplate a divided human/divine self, contemplate his and humanity’s funeral as a compartment nevertheless in a train of action and reflection within the sub-divided and mirroring mass-media eye of Protean age in myself and others. A drama unfolded, astonishing,
unpredictable
in its grain of living moment. Space (visual space, visualized space) became a stepping-stone into other
dimensions
.

Proteus was ascending a hill within a Waterfall, within a river, within a series of tides from which he arose as from a coffin and bottomless cradle into
our
self-made victim,
our
self-made actor,
his
self-made audience.

I reflected on the curvature along which he had come out of the depths as much as the heights: chiselled, as it were, into the ‘last comedian in space’ by an unfathomable and concrete Creator. I saw the tracery of peculiar self-knowledge in him, peculiar self-trial, peculiar sorrow, peculiar humiliation … For nothing was to be taken for granted in the ‘last sacred clown’ one associates with one’s intimate relatives, intimate family, intimate humanity. Neither the stereotypes of the box office nor the story-line of birth and death. To take such a story-line for granted was to surrender oneself to a conjurer’s unchanging universe. Whereas this unpredictable
mythmaker
was miracle and metamorphosis though so abused by us, so misunderstood, so exploited by advertisers, he had
become the strangest ‘first’ rather than ‘last’ grotesque within which the seed of a resurrection lay buried in us, deep in us, in advance of its time. Invisible concrete (partially visible seed) was the art of the resurrection of humanity.

‘To stand on the brow of a quantum television hill in advance of one’s time requires one to gaze backwards in space into a mist in which one discerns through every veil an event that has already happened but which is so curiously suspended in the present moment it seems utterly native to the future.’

My Dream appeared to retreat a little into the Voice I had just heard and then to re-emerge with greater strength. Proteus died in 1922 but he seemed more alive now within the language of Memory. The old man (he seemed old to me in 1922 although he was less than fifty-five) had lived a full life – whatever that means – when I was a child.

‘What is a full life?’

‘A full life entails a body or bodies that lie so deep – and beyond a one-track frame of existence – that their true complexity and potency live and relate to the future.’

Proteus was more alive now than he ever was. More alive within an immediacy of Dream that drew part, indeed much, of its revolving content from barbarisms, killings, terrorisms everywhere. More alive and real now because the innermost suspended body of the past, through the veil of the present and the future, drew him invisibly/visibly into millions and millions whose hopes are threaded into a fabric of menace and dread, a fabric of absurdities and trivialities as well,
through
which they survive (their hopes gain bodily,
wounded
substance in survival) from day to day: bitter day, trivial day, happy day, unhappy day, overshadowed by the
ephemeral
solidity of the news, the black news, the television soul, the radio homecoming of the maimed around the globe.

All this edged itself into a Dream in which ‘space’ becomes Proteus’s ‘stepping-stone’ into a theatre of conception and birth I would soon encounter on the hillside he was ascending:
becomes so because when I knew him it
was
so, he was a native of the abyss (whether I understood this or not). The germ of the abyss was there in his masks (adding new and unsuspected content to these), in the rags (divinity’s,
humanity
’s rags) that he wore, the inks, sketches, bottles, vessels of every shape and form, the warehouses, churches, schools, the business he conducted with the profane and with the sacred, the abuse he allowed others to heap upon him, in the
intoxications
of existences that he played – it was there in all these – in Poverty’s, El Dorado’s, primitive cinema, primitive radio, which I now perceived in Memory’s leap into quantum
proportions
.

When Alicia and I received a telegram of his death in the interior of the Guyanas, he climbed into my childhood as if this had become another stepping-stone into an audience within me which would write his obituary in film. We watched him avidly as the camera rolled within us on his last expedition for gold and diamonds, we watched him, he watched us, watchman of the golden abyss, watchman of the diamond abyss, weather charts, subtly rising oceans, subtly melting ice-caps. He was, some said, a notorious gambler and drunkard in the global village. Beardless as an infant yet crafty as a hermit. Adept at many games, God’s amoeban
mountaineer
of tragic/comic theatre, capable of uprooting many a family tree. He had tricked me when he gave me parents who were susceptible to many divisions and sub-divisions. He used chalks of glittering ice and snow-flesh in the tropics (as if to counsel one on the priceless family tree of the rainforests that were in danger), inks as black as midnight (as if to counsel one on the necessity to nurse the sun into a new lease of day). He painted me black at times, painted himself white at times.

After such trials (carnival ecologies, carnival inverted/subverted racism) I became a hollow man who had no
alternative
but to fast in spirit to become well: ‘Fasting is primordial insight into the hollow Day of the twentieth century as one retraces one’s steps.’

It was my turn now to mock him, to join hands with his tormentors, stitch a few famous last words on his lips, a four-letter word or two, an expletive or two, an inane gesture or two, by which posterity would remember him on
television
or radio as Comedian Uncle.

‘Damn you, blast the world,’ he said, as if to oblige me from within Poverty’s ghetto. There was faint applause. I lifted his hand in Carry-On Cardboard Cinema to everyone’s uproarious delight and let it fall on Rose’s backside as he ascended the hill. I placed him on quantum television hill in 1922. It was a triumph of science. ‘Poor devil! Poor scientist of the theatre, poor uncle Proteus, we’ve got him by his tail at last, he’s dead.’

He seemed to know it all in the throng of human/divine apes that viewed him as if he were rehearsing with us the tributes we paid him, the evolution of self-mockery. We were his spectatorial Shadows. He was elusive yet concrete and in seeing him through ourselves he immersed us in epic – absurd epic yet epic of conscience – and put us on trial. The screen or stage on which I saw him gave extremity to the curvature or line upon which he had come into our midst, an extremity of self-knowledge we could bear
in
our
abuse
of
him.
Such is the shared burden of divine comedy in
responsive
clowns. The clowns we abuse, in taking our abuse, shoulder our evolutionary deprivations, make light of our box-office stupidities, our best-seller orgies, regard us with supreme however self-deprecating character, supreme
metamorphic
insight into our self-love, self-hate, and eccentric malice.